


These Are Not The Dogs Of War

by ChibiFrieza



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-09
Updated: 2014-02-09
Packaged: 2018-01-11 18:48:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1176607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChibiFrieza/pseuds/ChibiFrieza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean turn into puppies.  Bobby copes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Are Not The Dogs Of War

He’s waiting on a phone call, is the thing. It’s the only reason he hears it, all the way from the study. He’s keeping an ear out for one of the Winchester boys to call while he’s reading through an ancient Shinto manuscript, trying to figure out whether the kami are going to take sides in this mess. Might not matter too much, Japan being the size it is, but you never know. He’s been making a kind of side project of it, looking into the Eastern pantheons, trying to figure out who’s still around, who might want to help.

So far, it’s not looking hopeful.

But there’s a scratching at the door. He looks up from his book and stills completely to listen. The scratching comes again, along with a high, animalistic whine, and he marks his place, sets the book on the nearest pile, and rolls out to the front door.

“All right, whatever y’are, I’m comin’,” he grunts, taking a preliminary look out the half-height peephole he’s installed.

Nothing.

He can’t quite see to the junction of door and porch, though. Whatever it is, it’s either invisible or really little.

Little doesn’t necessarily mean harmless. He picks up the saltgun he keeps next to the door, checks the load, then undoes the locks and pulls open the door, weapon trained low.

“What in the hell,” he says.

A pair of Doberman puppies sit crowded together on his doorstep. They’re shaking from exhaustion – can’t be from cold, it’s been hotter’n hell today and the sun’s only just gone down – and they’re leaning into each other like they’d fall over otherwise.

As soon as they see him, though, they seem to energize a bit. The one on the right stands up, tail wagging weakly, and lets out a pathetic little bark. The other creeps up tentatively and stretches to put a clumsy paw on Bobby’s leg.

“What in the _hell_ ,” he repeats, laying aside the weapon. He pulls out his flask and pours holy water into Rumsfeld’s dish, still sitting by the door, and sets the dish in front of the puppies.

They lap it up with nothing but eagerness and gratitude.

“Huh.” Well, he wasn’t really expecting demon puppies, but it never hurts to be sure. “C’mon, then, get yourselves in.” They scramble in over the salt line, messing it all up so that he has to redraw it before he can pay them any attention.

He shuts the door and turns. The puppies are sitting in the hall now, just waiting. It strikes him that that’s not usual puppy behaviour. One of the puppies is longer-legged with a slightly darker coat; the other has broader rust markings and a wide gait.

They both look like they can’t be much over ten pounds, legs still stubby, paws still oversized, and they still look like they want to just crawl into each other and sleep forever, but they’re sitting patiently.

A thought hits him. Could they possibly...? No. No, not possible.

Except it is, and he knows it is. He, of all people, knows how possible this kind of thing is.

Regardless, he has a pair of worn-out pups on his hands, and that’s something he can deal with. First things first.

“You two better get up here,” he says, patting his knees, and they perk up and come clambering up his legs. Once they’re settled, he goes about the business of getting things arranged. It’s awkward with a lapful of puppies, but he manages. Better in his lap than under his wheels. It helps that they aren’t fidgety; seems like they used their last energy reserves getting up there, and they’re little boneless heaps now.

He grabs an old blanket off a chair in the den, sets it down next to some newspaper on the kitchen floor, and puts together some leftover roast beef and carrots – the puppies sit up and take notice at that, but they wait until he puts the bowl down next to the blanket and then tumble down from his lap. While they start eating, he fills another bowl with water and sets it out.

The puppies make astonishingly short work of the food, even shoving at each other a little for the last of it, and within moments they’re curled up together in the blanket, almost indistinguishable from one another. They seem to fall asleep instantly.

Bobby watches them for a moment, sharp eyes gone soft. Then he frowns, leans forward. He can see the base of one puppy’s neck, and there’s a small marking in the fur that he’s pretty sure doesn’t usually come on a Doberman.

“Aw, hell,” he mutters.

This could take a while.

*

When neither Sam nor Dean calls at all that evening, he’s pretty much certain. They were cleaning out a nearby occult group, fairly run-of-the-mill except for the few items of power the initiates had managed to get their stupid hands on. It should have been routine, but he’d told them call if they needed help on how to destroy anything, and definitely call when they were done so he’d know when to expect them.

They should have been done hours ago.

He’s pretty sure, now, that the boys he’s been waiting for have already arrived, and he’s sure he’s seen that marking on the fur before, but he can’t seem to remember where. He’s set aside his kami research, taken to pulling out books not quite at random, hoping to find a match for the symbol somewhere in his library. Every book that fails to contain what he’s looking for puts him in mind of three others, and really, he’s thinking his first instinct was right. This is not going to be a quick solve.

Would help if he could ask them what happened, but that’s the devil of it. They clearly have some awareness of their true selves, or they wouldn’t have made it to Bobby’s. On the other hand, if they had full cognizance of their situation, they probably wouldn’t even be in voluntary contact right now, let alone so tangled in each other there’s no telling where one leaves off and the other begins. But then, if he thinks about it, it isn’t like those boys have ever been anything else, not really. Even after everything, all the hurt and lies and betrayal, they’re still fundamentally bound up in one another, have been all their lives, and it’s going to take more than the end of the world to split them apart. He fervently hopes.

Right now, it seems like they’ve only retained the most basic information: family, uncomplicated by human failures. Staying together, finding Bobby; they are still themselves, but buried deep beneath animal innocence and ignorance.

So he keeps looking. He leafs through pages and scans through images and thanks his stars that he remembered to make a sketch, because it’s not a complicated shape, but his eyes are starting to blur, and he wouldn’t trust his visual memory at this point, not as far as he could throw it.

That means it’s probably time to go to sleep, before he misses something. So he does.

*

By the time he gets out to the kitchen in the morning, he fully expects a mess on the newspapers or even the blankets, but instead, there are two puppies in the most extreme state of contained agitation he’s ever seen. With some surprise and a grudging, guarded sense of almost paternal pride, he lets them out the back to do their business. After, on their way back in, the shorter one bumps the other deliberately, and that’s all it takes. A mock scrap develops instantly, the puppies rolling over and over in the dusty yard, paws pinning ears awkwardly, shoving and squeaking and enjoying life immensely.

Bobby just lets them go for a minute, just watches from the doorway. Then he whistles sharply through his teeth, and they break away from each other and come trotting back in, skittering back over the ruined salt line that Bobby has to fix again.

They’re in the kitchen bent over the water dish when he catches up, and he scares up some more food and leaves it nearby. The taller, darker one, the Sam-puppy, is the one whose neck he saw last night, he thinks; he can see the symbol better now in the light of morning. Then the Dean-puppy shifts a little, and Bobby can see the symbol at the base of his neck.

It’s not the same.

Cursing himself roundly and efficiently, he makes a sketch of the new marking; he can see immediately how it interlocks with the other, and this narrows it down to one slim volume with four pages of combinatorial amulet patterns.

The puppies find him in the study, hesitating at the doorway, as though the room registers as forbidden somehow; with the piles of books stacked everywhere, he kind of appreciates the consideration, whatever’s prompted it. He’s just been refreshing his memory on how to reverse a working accomplished with a two-piece amulet, and it’s not complicated, but it’s a little tricky. Finicky, even. So he wants to make real sure he’s got the nuances just right, or humanity’s greatest hope are going to be stuck as puppies when the last trumpet sounds, and nobody wants that.

He digs out an old rawhide bone to occupy them while he makes the preparations. Spare clothes, folded up handy, just in case theirs didn’t make it. Chalk, oil, candles, a few herbs, purified water and a silver spoon. Under his present circumstances, drawing a proper circle is surpassingly awkward, but he manages.

The next trick is to get the puppies inside the circle, which isn’t actually the hard part. Dean-puppy doesn’t want to let go of the rawhide, and Bobby has to get firm with him. “Trust me, boy, in about five minutes you ain’t gonna want that anywhere near your mouth.” He gets them sat in the middle of the circle, then draws back to start on the real hard part.

Simple, yes; easy, no. The timing of the words is critical, and his heart’s up near his collarbone the whole way through, not worried about himself screwing it up, because he knows he can do this thing right; he’s worried one of the pups is going to make a break for it, or sneeze, or knock something over, and he knows it’s groundless fear because this is Sam and Dean and they’re obviously aware enough to sit still for something important.

But this is so important.

He stirs the herbed water one last time with the silver spoon, speaks the last phrase, and it happens.

Between one moment and the next, there are no longer puppies on the floor. Now there are two men, long of leg and body, sitting and blinking; too big to both fit inside the circle, crowded against one another and spilling limbs over the chalk circumference.

“Damn it,” says Dean peevishly, “I’m getting sick of this crap.”

“Tell me about it,” says Sam.

Bobby's not going to ask. He tosses a bundle at each of them. “Get dressed. Then we’ll talk.”

*

They both recognise the interlocking pattern when Bobby shows them.

“Sam picked it up,” Dean recalls, glaring.

“Wouldn’t’ve mattered who,” Bobby cuts in, forestalling the argument. “This here’s a symbol for extremely close bonds, usually either lovers or twins. Frankly, I’m kinda surprised you two triggered it, the way you’ve been lately.” He clips a hard glance between the two. “I’m thinking it probably wasn’t aimed at you, unless someone actually handed it to you?” Sam shakes _no_ , sheepish. “All right. So just another stupid kid messin’ around with stupid spells without a clue what he’s doin’, then. Of all the idiotic- who puts a random puppy transformation in a _bond amulet?_ ” He’s shaking his head, exasperatedly baffled.

“I guess, um.” Sam is still looking uncomfortable, taking on unnecessary guilt again. “We should go back and get rid of the rest of the stuff.” He glances at Dean.

“Yeah.” Dean addresses Bobby. “We were almost done. The rest is stuff we’ve seen before, so we shouldn’t have any more problems. Right, Sammy?”

“Right.” There’s confidence there, and it’s Sam, so it’s genuine; Bobby supposes they can handle it.

“Okay, then, git.” Bobby tosses Dean the keys to the Chevelle. Dean catches them easily with a grin on his face.

“Thanks.”

“Just don’t do anything stupid,” he warns, then herds them out the front door and watches them down the steps. “I’m expecting you boys back by dinnertime,” he calls after them.

“Sure, Bobby.” 

As they get in the car, he overhears Dean saying, “Man, our clothes better still be there. Those were my favourite jeans.”

Then the doors slam and they rumble away in a cloud of dust.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at [Livejournal](http://chibifrieza.livejournal.com/495787.html). Thank you for reading; comments are appreciated!


End file.
